Jogging -Day #1

My first day jogging in more than five years. Once upon a time, half my lifetime ago, I was a jogger, a real jogger, at least an hour, often two hours seven days a week. That was just for three years until I moved from Wisconsin to Maryland and my surroundings and routine changed and I stopped. Through the years I tried picking it up a number of times, but it never lasted more than a few weeks. Maybe I needed better scenery or greater familiarity with my surroundings or a form of accountability.

The last time I made a grand effort to jog everything seemed to be right. I was recently retired, so there was no reason I couldn’t fit it in. The scenery was beautiful, the foothills of the Los Padres National Forest in South Central California. The problem turned out to be the fat that I wanted to burn off. I was more than 50 pounds overweight and it was too much for my knees. Because it had been more than ten years since the last time I tried jogging I decided to take it easy and jog every other day. Everything was fine the first week, although I noticed my knees and a number of muscles that hadn’t been used in awhile where sore, that was to be expected. Then it hit me. The morning after the fourth time I jogged I could hardly walk my knees didn’t just hurt, they throbbed. They screamed, ‘Do Not Move Me!’ I waited two weeks and tried again, but the next morning the knee pain was back in full force.

Since then I’ve tried little bits and pieces of running a few times, just to do it, just to see what it felt like. I’ve lost quite a bit of the weight and am less than 20 pounds overweight now. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that my legs feel heavy and it’s hard to move them very far, not because they hurt as much as because I just don’t have the lung capacity to push them very far. In the last couple years the best I’ve been able to do is a couple blocks non-stop, but usually, half a block and I’m winded. Still, I did it before, if my knees don’t rebel, it seems I should be able to do it again.

Today I jogged a little more than a mile incrementally: jog a 10th of a mile then walk a 10th, then jog at 10th and so on until I finished.

It was painful, to say the least.

Just before stretching and starting my cool down I took a selfie. I plan to do that every time I finished jogging. My goal is to have 250 selfie’s by the end of the year that means I jog roughly 5 times a week.